Welcome to our blog community! This blog will show you how CED is helping emerging companies scale and grow in the Research Triangle Region. Plus we post news about our members and entrepreneurial resources.

Pages

Monday, March 10, 2014

Take Business to New Heights with a 3-Step Strategic Marketing Plan

Has
your business reached a plateau in terms of growth? When you started your
business, did you create and implement a marketing plan? If not, now is a good
time to revisit the importance of what a strategic marketing plan can do for
your business.

To
refresh your memory, marketing plans serve as a guide for achieving your
overarching business objectives, determining how, where and to whom you will
find the greatest opportunities for lead generation and increased sales.
Similar to business plans, strategic marketing plansrange from short to long documents and vary
in terms of breadth and depth. If you don’t know where to begin, follow these three simple steps.
Addressing these questions will provide the foundation of a dynamic marketing
plan that evolves over time.

1. Who are you? What do
you want to accomplish?Whether your business is a
start-up or well established, it’s important to record the history in the
marketing plan. Keep the story brief and include the background about your
founders, core products and services, mission and vision.

What’s your position in
the marketplace? Do you focus on business-to-business
(B2B)/business-to-consumer (B2C), a specific geographic location or industry
segments? Make sure to define your target audience as well.

Next, where do you want to
take your business? An essential element of your marketing plan is articulating
specific, measurable business goals, number of clients, revenue forecasts and
desired timeframes for achieving your goals.

2. What does the
competition look like?Analyze the competitive
environment by conducting a SWOT analysis, and identify your business’
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). This information
allows you to discover key differentiators and develop a Unique Value
Proposition. The value proposition explains what benefit you provide for your
customers/prospects and how you do it uniquely well. Among the information to
include are details about competitive products, pricing, promotion methods and
brand attributes.

3. How will you achieve
your goals?You’ve outlined your
business and goals and defined the competition. What comes next? Developing the
strategies (the why), defining success metrics (how to achieve the strategy)
and identifying the tactics (how and where the messages will be distributed.)

The other crucial piece of
the strategic marketing plan is a detailed action plan that specifies roles and
responsibilities, timeline, message frequency and costs. One thing to note – if
you’ve identified several business goals, then you will need to develop
multiple strategies and tactics to achieve them.

What’s next?Whether the marketing plan
is simple or complex, implementation and execution are critical to success. Equally
important is measuring the outcome and reporting results against the plan. Are
you on track, or do you need to make adjustments?

3 comments:

It will definitely ease your work of handling a big project. As a project manager I use scrum in my projects. One of my friends referred me to use the Guide to Scrum Body of Knowledge by scrumstudy.com. I like the concepts of sprints, daily standup meetings, etc. the SBOK Helped me alot in Understanding how Agile Project Management works.

I would say that a PMP Certification is highly respected within both IT & non-IT communities where strong project management skills are required. If you plan on a long term career as a project manager, then yes, even with your level of experience, I would suggest getting your PMP. You can prepare yourself for the exam in one of the PMP trainingproviders like www.pmstudy.com/. You can do minimal prep-work to get 40 PMI® Contact Hours and apply to PMI for PMP Exam before the class begins.

RSS/Atom Feeds

WRAL Tech Wire

NC Biotech News

Testimonial

“For the last 10 years CED has helped me to know what I need to know and to meet the people I need to meet. Every company has a different path to success, but in North Carolina all of those paths go through CED. Every entrepreneur - aspiring or experienced - needs vision, perseverance, and CED.” ~Michael Pollack, co-founder Advanced Liquid Logic